reynold1

reynold1@arizona.edu

Office

Harvill 239D

Reynolds, Renee Helen

Assistant Professor of Practice

Reneé H. Reynolds is a scholar of comic books, who focuses on the rhetorical history of media panics that have affected comics-like forms since their inception. These studies shape on-going research into fringe fan cultures in general and comics culture specifically in order to better understand the often-delicate dialectical relationship they maintain with consumer identities that are seemingly paradoxical in their indulgence in and animosity towards popular culture. She earned a PhD in Rhetoric, Composition & the Teaching of English from the University of Arizona in 2018. Since stepping to the front of a classroom for the first time in 2006, she has taught literature, creative writing (the focus of her master’s degree), first-year writing and composition, and undergraduate research. Throughout her teaching career, she has focused on traditionally underrepresented populations and TRiO-funded teaching projects, including the University of Arizona’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Consortium.

Currently Teaching

PAH 200 – Introduction to Applied Humanities

This courses introduces and helps students to practice a set of critical and practical skills developed specifically for understanding and improving the human condition. Over the course of the semester we will: 1) survey the origins and history of the applied humanities, paying particular attention to the intersection of ways of seeing and doing; 2) examine exemplary research-informed and publicly-facing projects for insight into how to theorize and improve life in the community and beyond; and 3) explore tools and techniques for engaging in small and large scale applied humanities endeavors.

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PAH 201 – Applied Humanities Practice: Techniques and Technologies for Public Enrichment

This course introduces the common techniques and technologies involved in applied humanities work, providing students with the concepts and skills they need to plan, conduct, analyze, and evaluate conceptually rigorous, publicly-facing, and community-enriching projects. Over the course of the semester we will: 1) survey practical approaches and research methods commonly used in the applied humanities; 2) examine exemplary projects that have employed these ways of doing, and in the process gain insight into how to adapt them for other projects; and 3) explore a variety of tools and technologies that support data collection, sharing, analysis, and implementation, culminating the design of your own applied humanities project.

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PAH 221 – Creating, Imagining, Innovating: Intercultural Approaches for Academic and Career Success

The course helps students to engage deeply with the habits of mind and an expanding set of critical and practical applied humanities skills developed specifically for understanding and improving the human condition. Over the course of the semester we will: (1) read and critically analyze the writing of people from many cultures who have found creative and innovative approaches to a variety of complex challenges, with particular attention to their applied habits of mind; (2) engage in reflective projects that open pathways to developing students' own creativity and imagination for real-world applications of successful habits of mind; and (3) design a project in which students focus on something in the world that requires personal applications of at least three of the habits of mind they have studied. Students will use project management and planning methods to write a project description, carry out an initial pilot version of the project, report on steps they have accomplished, and write a critical analysis of the project.

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PAH 350 – Health Humanities: Intercultural Perspectives

We are all participants in receiving and interpreting healthcare. This course will encourage and support the development of participants' abilities to gain expanded knowledge and to engage actively as critical, discerning, humane participants in the present and future delivery of healthcare and of health and wellness in any context. The course provides theory and practice in an inclusive and applied approach to humanities-based ways of thinking and knowing. We are all participants in receiving and interpreting healthcare, so all students are welcome. For students with the goals of advanced study in the health or other related professions: this course will enable you to provide healthcare, shape policy around it, or engage with health and wellness in other capacities in our globally connected world. As participants in the course you will engage with an inclusive, outward-facing, and applied discipline. You will be offered tools to improve transcultural communication skills by deep reading and reflection on core humanities approaches to the world of health and wellness and their interaction with global cultures.

We will use a mixture of discussions and small and whole group activities. Course activities may include active engagement in discussions online and in class, and critiquing a range of written texts, from those written by classroom peers to academic papers, literary texts of various kinds, or film narratives on health, wellness, and global understandings of those issues.

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PAH 160D2 – Living the Good Life: Humanities Perspectives on Culture and Community

This interdisciplinary course analyzes myths and cosmologies that reflect various societal approaches to the grand mysteries of life as represented in language, culture, and narratives. Beginning with an overview of myth as a moving force in life, students generate a list of grand mysteries to pursue answers that explore the past, present, and future. Select texts analyzing myth as well as works of fiction and contemporary film and television will round out the course as students work toward analyzing their own cosmology, a chosen mythology, or develop their own unique mythology for the digital age. Particular emphasis will be paid to myths and cosmologies of groups in conflict and an analysis of the clash resulting from competing perspectives.

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PAH 220 – Collaboration: A Humanities Perspective

This course explores how collaborative endeavors are influenced by culture, identity, and diversity. Drawing from the linguistic, cultural, and philosophical traditions of the humanities, we will study what it means to function effectively as part of a diverse collaborative, from small, informal communities to large, formal organizations. In contrast to the largely empirical epistemologies and methodologies of the hard and social sciences, we will approach the concept of collaboration as a subject and reflection of the human condition, considering the different cultural elements that influence cooperation and the meanings human beings derive from cooperation. We will explore how cultural and personal concepts such as power distance, individualism, gender roles, and orientation to time, tasks, and relationships shape collaboration. Course topics include the qualities of diverse collaboratives, the relationship of cultural diversity to collaboration, questions of personality and identity in the workplace, and leadership and assessment in a multicultural context. In addition, the course will seek to enhance understanding of how dominant institutional and cultural forces impose themselves on collaborative endeavors, disadvantaging certain groups such as women, racial/ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, and people with a lower-power socioeconomic status.

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